How often does your heart break seeing your child carry that heavy backpack to school? Apart from the mental burden of studies and homework, the 2-kilo weight that your child has to carry between your home to the school and back is causing spine and back problems. Dr Shumayou Dutta FASSI, MS (Ortho), Consultant Minimally Invasive Spine Surgeon, Neck & spine clinic, Kolkata writes how heavy school bags affect your child's health and what you could do to lighten the burden.

Children have become a frequent feature of a spine specialist's outpatient department across the country. This shouldn t come as a surprise. Every morning as the nation awakes, children are set off to school to outshine and outdo. Children carrying heavy school bags exposed to spinal injury

Heavier than the weight of expectations on them is the weight of the school bags they carry. Eight periods a day equates to eight textbooks, eights notebooks, tiffin box and a full litre of water a concerned mother told me when I was puzzled at how could the bag weigh so much. Her child, along with many others, suffers from frequent back pain. Another 13-year-old girl told me that many of her seniors in school suffer from spondylosis ! Why does a 13 year old girl even know the word spondylosis I wondered. Why don t schools use tablets? That way a child can have all the encyclopaedias in the world in their backpack at the weight of a single notebook. But that s another debate. Here's are the ill-effects of carrying a heavy school bag.

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